Battling it out with Bungie's master chiefs.

bvious statement of the year: Halo 3 is big-3 million units sold in one month big. And EGM's post-game interview with developer Bungie was big, too-so big that we left lots of killer info on the cutting-room floor. So enjoy the best plate of leftovers you'll ever eat: all the juicy extras from our conversation with Brian Jarrard, Bungie community and franchise lead, and Tyson Green, multiplayer design lead, who tell us what makes Halo 3 so, uh, big.

EGM: Let's start with Halo 2. The general vibe we've gotten from talking to you after the game was that the feeling around Bungie was very...negative. Presumably, because of a lot of stuff that had to be cut. At the same time, the public reaction to the game was overwhelmingly positive, complete with high scores. Were you surprised at all, between the time that you finished the game and it came out, that it was received so well?

Tyson Green: We weren't surprised by what people were complaining about, we cut the ending after all, and we caught a lot of heat on that and were really bummed about that. But the game did have strengths. It's easy to look back at Halo 2 and say man, that was a crap game compared to Halo 1 or Halo 3, but in its own right it was a pretty good game. The Xbox Live, the online experience was fresh and new at the time, and really good I think, and that carried us along. I think a lot of the positive reaction that we got after the fact was due to that, due to the new stuff we'd added, that was tempered by the stuff we did have to cut, and the negative vibe around the office was really that stuff, we're a bunch of critical perfectionists, we hate the things we feel like we've done wrong, and we felt like we had done a lot wrong. It's easy to forget sometimes that some things did go right, and it did turn out alright.

Brian Jarrard: I would just add that we still like Halo 2, and we still liked Halo 2 after we shipped it, but like Tyson pointed out, we're so hyper-critical over here that we sometimes can't really see beyond our own minute details, things we can't let go of. We knew the game was super-fun, we played the hell out of it internally, so I think we still expected and hoped that it would do really well. We weren't shocked, we didn't think that we'd shipped the worst game ever, it's just hard for us to look past the fact that internally, we felt that we could have and should have done more than we were able to do with the time that we had. I think we all still expected that...the game was still good, we just couldn't help but feel that we wanted it to be more than it was.

EGM: Can you talk about how that led to Halo 3, what the attitude was going in, and also how that changed the creative process?

TG: Right up front we said, what went wrong that last time, and how do we fix that? There's the usual introspection process, and what it led to was, we were a lot more rigorous and conscientious about doing a pre-production, planning things out, knowing what we were getting into, being really serious about it. The kind of things we took for granted on Halo 2. Halo 1, we were flying by the seat of our pants and we managed to bring it in. We figured we could do that same thing again on Halo 2, and it didn't work out as well. We got more disciplined, we got more rigorous about things going into Halo 3. In the long term it really paid off.

BJ: I've jokingly said in the past that, I think our displeasure and bad taste from Halo 2, the ending and all those things that got the fans upset, I think ultimately made Halo 3 a better game, because it really lit a fire for a lot of us. I think it inspired people to maybe even do better work, say "I'm not going to make that mistake again, this is the final chapter of the trilogy, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our fans to go out with a bang." For all the things Tyson said, it really influenced our approach, the process, even just from a practical level, I believe for Halo 2, I think we had about two producers for the entire project. Through Halo 3, I think we had around 10. So just to show you, the production and the discipline was one of our biggest learnings through Halo 2, and we realized that the way that Bungie made games needed to evolve. That was a huge learning for the studio.

EGM: One of the first things we remember seeing after Halo 2 was a render of the Chief, where he was in a desert...do you remember this?

BJ: Oh, yeah, that was actually...that was just a random fun thing one of our contractors did, they just made it as a desktop wallpaper. In her spare time Zoe took a model, super-up-rezzed it, added a bunch of textures and effects. That was always meant to just be a fun fan-service desktop. I know that image sort of became infamous...

EGM: So that wasn't at all like, hey, maybe this is what Halo should look like in the next generation...

BJ: No, absolutely. Nothing like that. It literally, truly was a contractor who had some spare time and access to some tools and had some talent and just visualized...what would a more realistic-looking Halo possibly look like? That's it, that's all it was.

EGM: That's funny, because it's in the desert as well, leading us to believe it was pre-production for Halo 3.

TG: Yeah, that was before we'd announced anything about Halo 3. I'm sure people knew it was coming after Halo 2, but that was just a random one-off.

EGM: In one of the vid docs, Marty O'Donnell talked about an early draft of the story where he admitted there's no dramatic moments or anything like that. What can you tell us about that version of the story, what changed, what evolved in the story from that earlier version?

TG: Neither of us were directly involved in the story team, but we know that the story team went through countless revisions of...minor events, minor relationships, just a lot of things changed. I don't really have an answer for you on that one, because I don't know exactly which version that is...

BJ: Yeah, I don't know which either. I mean, initially, as I recally, in the early, early stages, we almost had a hundred people trying to write a story together. We decided that we'd really make it transparent, let the whole team be involved. I think that was a noble gesture, but in reality you can't write a story like that, by committee, so maybe what Marty was experiencing, some of the drafts through that process were probably jumbled and just had too many cooks in the kitchen. I know that shortly after, the story team went into a hole, took the ideas from the greater team, and boiled them down and did their best to streamline them into something that would convey really well to a gameplay experience.

EGM: Are there any examples that know about of subplots that were proposed or got farther along, but were cut for one reason or another? Or side characters that factored in?

TG: I think a lot more of the flex in the story was just the locations and the sequences of events. One example is, for the early part of the process, the portal that goes to the Ark, there wasn't. The entire Ark was located underground on Earth, just stuff like that. Little things like that that changed. That particular one changed because we felt like, it's Halo, and if you're not going to something new and just mind-blowing, you're missing out on something that made the first two games cool. There weren't really subplots or characters that came and went, it was more about, what's the sequence of events?